The invention relates to a technology of controlling distributing and relaying a mailing list of an electronic mail, and is an electronic mail bypass processing control system for bypassing and transferring, in case a fault occurs in a server (relay server) on a transfer route, data to a destination terminal device among terminal devices registered in the mailing list without via the fault-occurred server.
A technology referred to as a mailing list is broadly known as unit for multicasting information such as an electronic mail, etc, to a multiplicity of recipients. This hitherto-known mailing list is that when the electronic mail arrives at, for example, a representative address managed beforehand as the mailing list, a management server executes a variety of transfer control processes to distribute (transfer) the electronic mail to a plurality of addresses registered in the mailing list.
At this time, the majority of electronic mails distributed (transferred) by the mailing list management server are transferred via a plurality of servers (relay servers) implementing a predetermined communication protocol as in the case of, for instance, a normal electronic mail.
Herein, in case the transfer of some electronic mails fell into a failure due to an occurrence of fault in a server on a transfer route, it follows that the mailing list management server or a transfer server just anterior thereto repeats re-transferring the failure electric mails several times to the fault-occurred server at a predetermined time interval. In case all these re-transfers fell into the failure, the server trying to transfer the electronic mails to the fault-occurred server sent an error message to a transfer source, and finished the process of transferring the electronic mails.
On the other hand, as for the addresses registered as transfer destinations in the mailing list, all the addresses indicating users who become final destinations or terminal devices corresponding those users (which will hereinafter simply be termed terminal devices), are not necessarily registered. Namely, the one single management server executes the distributing (transferring) process, and besides the transferring process can be shared by providing, for example, a plurality of relay serves serving as the management servers (which will hereinafter simply be termed relay servers) group by group. In this case, a representative address of a different mailing list is further registered in the relay server on the transfer route, and the relay server further distributes (transfers) to addresses registered in this different mailing list.
Thus, in the mailing list, there was a case in which loads applied on the servers and the network are shared. Accordingly, in case a certain server receives the electronic mail addressed to the representative address of the mailing list, this server, in addition to transferring the electronic mail to the terminal devices managed by this server itself, must transfer the electronic mail to the terminal devices out of the management of the server, and must further transfer the electronic mail to the server that manages the different mailing list, and so on.
In case the fault occurs in the relay serve as described above, however, there arose a problem that the electronic mails can not be transferred to the terminal devices managed by the relay server and to the terminal devices registered in the mailing list managed by the server.
Note that Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2002-325104 by the present applicant is given as this type of prior art, however, a technology disclosed in this publication is to transmit the electronic mail to an address after being changed by utilizing absence answering information in a case where the address of the transfer destination is changed in the mailing list, but is not what assumes the fault of the relay server.
[Patent Document 1]
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2002-325104 (FIG. 1)